How About Real Intelligence

I’m reading in the Washington Post this morning that visual artists and photographers are already feeling the blows of artificial intelligence by having it steal their images. They are leaving the social media that claims copyright for anything they post there..

Last night I attended an event jointly presented by the Toronto Symphony and Tapestry Opera - a master class for four rapidly rising women conductors. The program, also jointly supported by the Vancouver Symphony, is intended to create more gender balance in this professional field. It was wonderful to watch each of them privileged to work with seasoned professional musicians as well as being tutored in a good humoured way by a master conductor. This is the second of these master classes I have attended watching some of the same young professionals, and what a pleasure to see growth as they continue building their careers.

And what I heard were one time performances. Perhaps they have been recorded and will appear online later. But nothing can duplicated hearing it as it was - with the drama and immediacy, and sometimes the improvement as the conductors repeated a passage after direction. No mashup by a machine can ever duplicate it. We need to experience real events in real time created by real artists - in concert halls and galleries.

Please feel free .. .

Coming back from an appointment I stopped to look at a paper surrounded by sticky tape and left on the sidewalk. It said, “Please feel free to take it”. My guess is that it was originally posted to something left on the street. It’s not uncommon for folks to leave something near the sidewalk that they don’t want any more. If someone else can use it, that’s a good thing.

But the slogan made me think of how we treat the natural environment. Earlier in the morning I was reading Marilynne Robinson’ new book, Reading Genesis, where she points out that unlike the Babylonian culture that existed when the book was written, that creation was a gift, and that the gift was also supported by promises of continuity, even when the recipients behaved badly. We appear to be slow learners. We still feel free to help ourselves.

The Power of Words

We are seeing how words can mislead, wound, charm and heal these days. A phrase that some use to seek justice make others feel threatened. Words can suggest a context that excludes. Historians have pointed out that the first characters that some children met in books caused the readers of Dick and Jane to feel excluded, because their lives were not like those of middle class suburbia Nearly all such books were boring. There wasn’t much to observe except to see Dick run. Jane and Sally apparently didn’t.

But one author changed everything. Instead of green lawns with no weeds we were catapulted into the world of an invasive cat who made a mess of the house when a mother left for the afternoon – and not even a fish in a bowl could save it.  It didn’t take a ton of words to tell an interesting story for us and a different Sally – and rhymes made The Cat in the Hat memorable using only 222 different words. In a later triumph, the legendary Dr. Suess won a bet of fifty dollars when Bennett Cerf challenged him to write a book using only 50 words.  He did even better by using only one word of more than one syllable – anywhere.  Remember Green Eggs and Ham?

The Beginner Books were fun – both for parents to read and children to listen to at first -and then recite. It changed the children’s book publishing in terms of illusrations and it made reading fun. I notice that many Suess books can be downloaded and listened to on a tablet rather than being read by absent mothers and fathers. That’s rather too bad when those early readings created family bonds and bouts of laughter and maybe the Cat should point that out.  The Suess texts later became much more sophisticated and handled topics like disarmament and the environment.

They still come back to me with a line or two from Too Many Daves whose mother lacked imagination in giving her twenty-three sons the same name – which meant they never came when she called them. Some more interesting alternative names were suggested . . .

“And one of them Shadrack. And one of them Blinkey.

And one of them Stuffy. And one of them Stinkey.”

The last word here was always well received – but my all-time favourite was – and still is:

“Another one Putt-Putt. Another one Moon Face.

Another one Marvin O'Gravel Balloon Face.”

 It was good to imagine calling people funny names - even insulting ones in a story, even though you weren’t supposed to do that in real life.. Maybe the other lesson was that Mothers didn’t always get it right,

Two visions

There are a lot of articles about the two American parallel universes that we are going to have to live with for the coming months. I’m already trying to wean myself from any political articles on this without total success. I was nevertheless impressed by another duality that Tom Friedman talks about in the the New York Times this morning - These are networks of nations with opposing battlefronts. He calls them “resistance” and “inclusion”.

They also have some common elements, One tries to bury the past. The other tries to work toward a more connected and balanced future. Russia and Ukraine are one pair. The Middle East is more complicated but also has opposing forces. The same alternatives might be seen in the United States.

Life is not quite that simple, of course. There are elements of the past that we are discarding and immediately adapting the new thing - like an acquaintance who thinks AI can solve all kinds of things that it clearly can’t. We have abandoned some of the civility that creates a greater degree of trust. On the other hand we hang on to things that don’t seem to please anybody in a new and changing world. But perhaps “either-or” needs to give way to “both-and”.

To Start Another Year

Happy New Year!

I am told it is inappropriate to offer such wishes after January 7th - but I don’t know the source of such rules that carry any weight. So Happy New Year to you, as I move into another year well beyond my three score and ten - and celebrate my 39th year of blogging. In those days in 1995 on Blogger, the options were pretty limited to black and white text - and probably the content wasn’t very nuanced either.

The new year has started well with the arrival of a great niece as the first baby to be born in her city. I could continue by quoting from all the year-end reports that promise either relief or disaster for the planet, but I won’t for today at least. What did strike me in one newsletter was encouragement to enter the fight for climate change - in this case by a bunch of seniors against a a major Canadian bank. I wonder about the wisdom of war and battle metaphors for change of any kind. If all our relationships with others, whether individual or corporate, are to be primarily adversarial, is this the right approach? Making war is literally not working out well for many who have life within our planet right now. Is this the right way to move hearts and minds? Are there other and better options? That’s going to be something to explore this year.